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Lynn at Taps Restaurant beside the river in Petaluma.

A friend this week was telling my wife Lynn on the phone that she’s looking for a job. “What are you looking for?” Lynn asked and was startled by her friend’s answer: “It could be any of several possibilities. I’m trying to keep a fuck-the-bull attitude for the moment.”

“What’s a fuck-the-bull attitude?” Lynn asked with trepidation, wondering if it were some new slang, and it was then her friend’s turn to be startled: “I said a flexible attitude.” Laughter ensued. (Lynn’s hearing was tested recently; it’s almost perfect.)

Yours truly reading the Taps menu before ordering a Belgian ale and pulled pork. (Photo by Lynn Mitchell)

A poetry journal, The Advocet, just published two of Lynn’s poems, Bird Watching and Between Tides, and both of us received our second Covid-19 vaccinations three weeks ago, so last Friday we decided to celebrate both accomplishments with an outdoor meal at Taps Restaurant and Tasting Room. The food is first rate, and the restaurant’s location beside the Petaluma River is enchanting despite being downtown.

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Photo bombing?

Actress Paris Hilton shows up during the 2013 kangaroo-mating season in Australia.

Photobombing, the mischievous trick of injecting oneself into someone else’s picture by unexpectedly popping up just as the photo is snapped, is hardly new. Holding up two fingers behind an unwitting subject’s head is a longstanding prank. The question in this photo is who was photobombing whom: Paris and a companion imitating two amorous kangaroos or the two photobombing Paris’ affection for her marsupial companion?

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Time Zone Politics

Benjamin Franklin is often credited with dreaming up the idea of the Daylight Saving Time in 1784 as a joke.

This year’s Daylight Saving Time has now been in effect three weeks, which brings up a few odd facts about it.

As our schoolmarm taught us, it’s Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight’s Saving Time, although the latter is widely misused. Think of it this way: the word Saving is being used as a noun, and Daylight is, in this case, an adjective modifying it. The same would hold true in the phrase “a money saving plan” where money is being used as an adjective describing the type of saving plan.

Some odd exceptions: The March 2019 Old Farmers Almanac noted, Daylight Saving Time is observed nationwide except in “American Samoa, most of Arizona, Guam, Hawaii, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands….

“The Germans were the first to officially adopt the light-extending system in 1915 as a fuel-saving measure during World War I. The British switched one year later, and the United States followed in 1918, when Congress passed the Standard Time Zone Act, which established our time zones.” In 1920, the law “was repealed due to opposition from dairy farmers (cows don’t pay attention to clocks). During World War II, Daylight Saving Time was imposed again.”